Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. You can read Dan's recent work here

Forget about Newsnight emails: all that matters with Jimmy Savile is that anyone who helped him is convicted

Are we completely losing our minds? I just sat and watched about 10 minutes of the top of a Sky news bulletin which dissected the reasons why the Newsnight programme into Jimmy Savile was canned. At the very end, almost apologetically, the presenter said words to the effect that “And of course we mustn’t forget there is a serious police investigation taking place into these allegations”.

Well, we have forgotten. In a big way.

This morning I have seen a debate on Twitter between Mehdi Hassan and the world, about whether these new allegations are worse than Hutton. John Simpson has been roaming around describing this as the worst crisis to hit the BBC in 50 years. The Prime Minister has weighed in, claiming the BBC has “serious questions” to answer about its conduct.

Children have – almost certainly – been sexually assaulted. The police have instigated a nationwide investigation which, according to one officer involved, appears to involved “abuse on a massive scale”. Over 200 possible victims have so far been identified. Arrests are said to be imminent.

But this morning the media, our politicians and just about anybody who can get themselves in front of a microphone is charging around, demanding to know what producer was sent which email about some Newsnight program that may or may not have been spiked. Talk about losing our sense of priorities. We’ve gone from the offence, to the cover-up, to the cover-up of the cover-up, before we’ve even managed to nail down the initial offence and its perpetrators.

It’s madness. The media is eating itself, and no one appears to have a more voracious appetite than the BBC itself. We now have the stupefying spectacle of the BBC commissioning and airing an exposé on itself, attempting to shore up the Corporation’s journalistic integrity by revealing to the world the Corporation's lack of journalistic integrity.

There is only one thing that matters here: that anyone who supported Savile in his grotesque campaign of paedophilia is arrested, charged and convicted. That’s it.

There should be no Panorama exposés. No appearances before select committees. No “internal investigations”. BBC management and staff should be sitting in their offices, co-operating fully and exclusively with police as they carry out their investigations. And if that means we all have to wait a few months or so until we get the bottom of what the BBC did or didn’t do, so be it. And if it also means the BBC’s glorious record of impartiality and integrity gets dragged through the mud over that period, tough.

It’s our obsession with celebrity that allowed Savile to perpetrate his alleged crimes. And it’s our obsession with celebrity which now has us losing sight of what really matters in this case.